A medical resident worked 207 hours of overtime in a month. His case highlights Japan’s continuing problem with karoshi - death by overwork.

207 hours/month = 51.75 hours overtime per week, or a 92.75 hour workweek. Until recently, US residents worked those hours, too (it’s now technically capped at 80 hours, but there are exceptions.)

Medical training is toxic.

80 hours.

What an absolute acid trip of a country.

Find a country where medical residency doesn’t work like this. It’s an archaic holdover from the 1800s era when student doctors were trained by apprenticeship

But…. apprenticeships don’t have to be like that. Like there are apprenticeships for many other jobs, and they never are this abusive and awful.

I mean, yes. That’s why medical residencies need to be reformed. There’s zero reason they should be paid so little and made to work so many hours. None whatsoever.

And, in fact, I often make the argument that the current structure of medical residency actively harms patients because it filters out people with disabilities or even just normal smart people. Because the types of individuals who can tolerate and succeed in long, drawn-our, deeply abusive working environments are very, very, very different from the populations that they are then tasked with serving.

We wonder why physicians are so often out of touch with the struggles of their patients, and I think the structure of their training contributes a lot to that problem

Sounds like Hazing to me.

It’s absolutely hazing. So is a lot of nursing school, though much tamer. I point this out to my colleagues frequently.

My apprenticeship is 4 years long and I work 36 hours a week, then need to do the learning and academic work which is around an additional 35 hours a week.

I’m just rolling into year 4 and I’m pretty tired now.

I’m also the only one left, everyone else who started in my cohort has dropped out because of the workload.

The Netherlands has pretty strict laws on how much you’re allowed to work, 12 hours max a day 60 hours max a week and you can deny working overtime.

During Covid I worked about 72-80 hours per week. It was awful. We were pulling guard on stockpiles of COVID vaccine since our president of our university was from Iran and he expected crazy right wing terrorism to try to destroy or steal them.

Money was incredible; the overtime was AWFUL. I single handedly think working that 6 months of overtime is now why I medically retired.

Same here. I worked overtime 45 out of 52 weeks in 2020. Only to come out of the pandemic and still have hospitals trying to push too many patients on us, understaff us, supply chain shortages… And they wonder why so many healthcare professionals have burnt out and quit the field.

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207 Hours Overtime: Japanese Man in Kobe Worked to Death(unseen-japan.com)

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